On Covid, Politics, and Providence
January 2022
I’ve been teaching in-person classes all year, but caught Covid over winter break. So it goes. The symptoms have been relatively mild — a slight sore throat, a mild headache, fogginess, mild fever, some congestion, and a bit of a cough. Probably the omicron variant. I’m double-vaccinated, not boosted.
The problem schools are facing is a matter of personnel related to staff shortages and people going down with Covid. There is no desire that I’ve seen, from teachers in Arizona, to close down schools. If a school does need to shut down, it will be due to staffing issues because too many people caught Covid.
There was some noise being made by union activists about preemptively switching to remote learning — but this is not representative of the vast majority of teachers.
The union doesn’t have real power in Arizona. This is a right-to-work state and most public school teachers in Arizona are non-union. The strongest power the union has is lobbying power — they work the media, they influence Democrats, they influence board members and administrators.
The biggest show of force for the teachers’ union was the #RedforEd strike of 2018. This was successful only because they sparked a movement that caught fire with non-union teachers. Most school administrators were sympathetic to the cause, and supported teachers who wanted to participate. After two days of school disruptions in 2018, teachers were already going back to their classes. The “leader” of the movement announced his “conditions” for returning to class, but that was a bluff. Closed schools were already announcing plans to re-open.
The original Covid school closures were the result of a snowball of uncertainty and fear. The virus was new. The evidence was unclear. Vaccines weren’t ready. From the Arizona Mirror in mid-March of 2020:
The order to close schools came from Gov. Doug Ducey and Superintendent of Public Instruction Kathy Hoffman, and is a reversal from a March 12 conference call they had with education leaders in which they recommended schools remain open.
But in the days since, dozens of school districts, charter school networks and private schools announced they were suspending classes. More said they were evaluating what to do while students are on spring break during the upcoming week and were likely to suspend classes in the future.
As for Gov. Ducey’s recently announced plan to give individual students money for alternative instruction if schools close for even a day, my response is to shrug my shoulders. I guess it might serve as a deterrent for schools to shut down? It might help a handful of families that apply for the money and use it? But again, I don’t see any schools trying to preemptively shut down.
We’ll see what other policy proposals are in store as the Arizona state legislative session starts this week. It is sure to be a whirlwind.
The teacher shortage was a problem before the pandemic. It is the result of decades of crappy policy. Covid has caused staff shortages across nearly every industry — not just schools.
The winter surge is taking a toll. Politicians will demonize their perceived opponents in an election year. The rest of us will be doing the best we can.
At least we’re past the stage of arguing whether in-person learning is the best public health option during this pandemic. Folks across the board seem to agree that, all things considered, kids are healthier at school than isolated on a computer screen.
That’s one piece of good news heading into 2022.
Another piece of good news is that pro-democracy Republicans are getting their props for defending our elections last year.
From the Arizona Republic Editorial Board:
The great victory of the 2020 election wasn’t the ascent of a candidate or cause or ballot initiative. It was the triumph of democracy against a plot to subvert and overturn the results of a presidential election.
Under assault by a sitting president and his high-wattage attorneys and operatives, a group of principled election officials, judges and other officeholders across the country steadfastly carried out their duties to deliver an honest outcome.
This newsletter isn’t explicitly about politics, but it is about human flourishing. Having a stable political system is essential for human flourishing. Vicious lies were spread about the 2020 election. Maricopa County officials stood firm and defended the truth. Most importantly, they presented documented evidence to prove it.
Trump lost.
We may never reach a world free of partisanship, but I hope to see the end of cult-like factions in our political parties.
We are living through an important era in Arizona and United States history.
The outcome of this era is undetermined.
Looking backwards, as I’ve written about before, history seems inevitable and so we talk a lot about providence.
There is a movie on Netflix called The Darkest Hour. It’s about Churchill coming to power in Britain just as Hitler’s forces were taking over the mainland of Europe. At the time, it seemed highly probable that Nazi Germany would conquer Britain. Only through the sheer willpower and political skill of Churchill, and the grit of the British people, did the tide turn.
Providence?
I don’t know. But I’m glad that it happened.
By the way, I could have used a less dramatic example of historical good fortune — I just happened to watch that movie while recovering from Covid so it’s fresh in my mind.
What’s perhaps true is that, at critical junctures of history, talent rises to the surface because the stakes are high.
Or maybe history turns on the cumulative actions of ordinary people.
Think about someone like Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a book that sparked an outpouring of abolitionist sentiment on the eve of the Civil War. Stowe had no idea what impact her writing would make. She was an unknown author who felt inspired to write a book about a runaway slave. The novel went viral and changed the course of history.
Abraham Lincoln didn’t know his destiny. But he was inspired by the American foundation and felt strongly that the moment called for a new generation of virtuous leadership.
Frederick Douglass didn’t assume any outcome was inevitable. He held Lincoln honest with direct criticism.
Providence?
I don’t know. But good things can happen when people find their authentic selves and respond in goodwill to the challenges of the times.
Wickenburg, Arizona. December 30, 2021.
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